I’ll never understand why obvious marketing makes it to the front page, only to get shat upon by 95% of the comments.

Of course we can do better than SQL. We could obviously do better than Javascript. It’s globally understood that we could all do better than English.

We sometimes struggle to express ourselves with language. We can blame the language, try to fix it, or invent a new language and try to get people to speak it.

I would rather spend my time refining my elocution than learn a new language. That said, there are words and phrases that simply work better in other languages. I don’t know a single-word corollary to ‘Simpatico’ in English.

I wish the best to those who would make programming more expressive, and the worst to those who would try to streamline away subtlety.

Performance is quite loosely linked to language, given sufficient abstractions and optimizations. I submit NumPy as an example. We humans have lots of ways to say what we want, and we want lots of different things in myriad ways. As an analyst I often wish for a richer language, some way I could transcend tabular data thinking to find and make associations around real-world state. I’m certainly self-satisfied when my nested subqueries return what I’m expecting, but I may be able to add more value if I had a better way of expressing my questions.

If we can do better than SQL, it ought to bring more people closer to the reality that lies behind the data, and further from the methods used to obtain it. Maybe I don’t have the words for what I’m looking for yet...